No, you're missing the whole point of trademark law. Trademark law is supposed to protect against consumer confusion. Let's say the owner of Quickie decides to dump tens of thousands (businesses are expensive) into revamping machines, improving QoS, adding WiFi and a cable subscription, etc. I think this is a dumb assumption because you're assuming Quickie can even afford to invest in better business practices both in terms of start-up costs and in terms of margins based on revenue generated, but let's even put that aside. We'll pretend Quickie can out-compete Quicky through better business practices.
Quicky, on the other hand, runs a dump. One of the machines electrocuted a guy and their dryers burn clothes. The place is a dump. People get robbed in the parking lot.Cynthia's friend Karl is new to the neighborhood and asks her, "Hey Cynthia, I need a good local laundromat. Know any good ones in the area?" She responds, "For the love of God, don't go to Quicky. Those guys are awful." Karl responds, "Quickie is that bad, huh? Okay, I'll avoid them." He then goes to Bumble and Tumble Laundromat a few blocks over.
No matter how much Quickie improves its business, Quicky will always hurt their business by confusing customers into thinking that they are actually Quickie or into thinking that they are the same business. That is why trademark law exists, and protection is surprisingly affordable to most businesses. Registration is only $275 for federal protection. Quickie's battle is not the same as EA, and they don't have to spend the same gobs of money on lawyers and court fees. 1) It's not going to be litigated beyond the trial court, most likely; 2) there aren't gobs of corporate e-mails to pore through in discovery; and 3) the neighborhood IP attorney isn't going to be as expensive because he or she won't have to specialize in that form of law.
The issue isn't whether the employee (or computer) is an agent and therefore authorized to file any DMCA claim. The issue is whether the authorized agent sent the notice "in good faith." The conundrum is that fair use does not have a bright line test. WB will claim it has no means of knowing whether a use is fair, so all DMCA claims are in good faith. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't work in pre-internet copyright terms. Early dismissal and summary judgment and counter-damages were common where the plaintiff should have known the use was fair. Basically, the problem is that no one can categorize, legally, whether a use is fair except for a judge, and by then you're eyeballs deep in legal fees.
IANAL, but I am familiar with the business. For those of you claiming this is self-destructive, the NMPA as well as individual publishers actually license the lyrics right to certain lyrics websites. The publishers own a valid copyright in the lyrics alone, so legally speaking, republication of the lyrics without copyright license is infringement. Several lyrics websites are officially licensed and sanctioned. I won't name names, but you can usually tell which are licensed and which aren't by the quality and accuracy of the lyrics on the site.
Usually the publishers steer clear of these sites due to lack of personal jurisdiction, or at best make half-hearted efforts by throwing around a take-down notice here or there. Publishers want to collect money, and they're well aware that going after Lars Lokke Ummerstal in Latvia isn't going to be profitable. However, take-down notices are relatively cheap and easy, and I believe the idea is to stick by principle and crack down on infringing websites in order to have a chilling effect on copyright infringement generally. This is not new, or particularly newsworthy.
It's also not really all that infuriating, from a copyleft perspective. Because publishers are licensing their copyrights to lyrics and tablature, they aren't strangling the marketplace of ideas. The only real question is whether or not the sites are unfairly targeting websites legitimately engaging in fair use (as opposed to those actually making money off of advertising revenue and merely claiming their use is fair), but, as fair use is an affirmative defense and not a bright line rule, there's no way for a site to prove as a threshold matter that their use is fair.
This isn't as straightforward now as it used to be. Google has now introduced full-sized image search which allows people to pull images directly from their Google search page rather than linking to the source page. Once upon a time, Google was able to get away with this because it only linked small-sized thumbnails that weren't suitable replacements to the original. The searcher actually had to link to the page to get the content, as you point out.
Now, however, the searcher can get the content, full-sized, directly from the search link without ever hitting the original site. The bandwidth still comes from the original site, but the image can be seen entirely within the Google context. Fascinatingly, this full-sized (as opposed to thumbnail) image linking is exactly the example that the judge in Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., which legitimized fair use of image searches, declared would not be an example of fair use.
Google has seemed to have entirely forgotten about that. Curiously, no lawsuits have popped up since. Granted, this is now in the days of robots.txt, but the law hasn't exactly caught up to discern the difference. Surely somebody with an interest in Google's deep pockets would sue for copyright infringement.
That said, the problem is clearly not that "technology" gets preferential treatment but that what one defines as "fair use" is tremendously murky and cannot be statutorily determined. It has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and the pattern of ruling on what constitutes fair use has absolutely no correlation to itself. For example, is it a fair use to watch a movie in a park (semi-public place that might warrant a public performance) to a group of 6 close friends and family? 12? On a big-screen? Who knows.
Until fair use gets locked down as to something other than "whatever the judge feels like is fair," everyone on both sides of the equation will scream about perceived injustice.
A system that restricts access control isn't voluntarily adopted by the marketplace? You don't say! Clearly what we need to do is mandate that this technology be included in all market devices so that even lawful owners must be hindered by the access restrictions since we can't distinguish lawful owners from unlawful ones. It's not like the determined criminals will ever disable the access restrictions, but if they do we just need to make them sufficiently complicated that it's really hard to circumvent. So maybe the complexities will cause a few points of failure for law abiding citizens... let's be realistic; people who own guns are probably all future criminals. Besides, we can criminalize circumvention with some kind of... anticircumvention clause. Better yet, how about we only lease funds so that you can never actually own a gun at all? Then we could know who's firing the weapon by checking it against the access database. We could even restrict firing to only authorized targets. We should call it firearms rights management.
If only some kind of marketplace restriction attempted to be forced upon customers already existed, I could prove to you how great and effective a system this would be!
I find it interesting so many people are ready to boycott a movie based on a single high-profile participant's personal beliefs. (See also Tom Cruise) Do you think everyone else working on that movie believes the same? Should their livelihoods be hurt because they associated with a bigot? How many bigots do you work with? Do you know? Would you boycott a movie because the key grip was anti-Semitic? Or do we only care about the opinions of rich people?
The legal definition of entrapment varies from country to country, but the basic definition is that entrapment occurs when a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a crime that he or she otherwise would not have committed. Knowledge that the person is a law enforcement officer is not required. See, e.g. Jacobson v. United States, 503 U.S. 540 (1992). What is required is some form of but-for causation -- that but for the law enforcement officer's conduct, the defendant would not have committed the crime. Whether the defendant knows the officer is a law enforcement agent goes to objective / subjective state of mind standards regarding whether the defendant was likely to commit the crime -- i.e. inducement is harder to prove if the defendant did not know the facilitator was a figure of legal authority, because there is less of an indication of compulsion. In Jacobson, the government targeted the defendant with a child pornography mail subscription and arrested him upon his receipt and opening. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the defendant did not have a predisposition towards purchasing child pornography (as no other child pornography was found in his home), and therefore but for the post office inspectors' actions, Jacobson would not have committed a crime.
What you may be referring to is entrapment by estoppel. That "applies when, acting with actual or apparent authority, a government official affirmatively assures the defendant that certain conduct is legal and the defendant reasonably believes that official." United States v. Howell 37 F.3d 1197, 1204 (7th Cir. 1994).
While I don't dispute your basic premise that programming languages should be taught in curricular liberal arts colleges (and indeed I was required to "learn" one at mine), I would argue that there is more to be gleaned from an understanding of literature or history or geography than there is from understanding a programming language. A programming language teaches you the particulars of how to realize software within the context of that software. You might be able to take away some general concepts regarding how computers work, but understanding how a computer executes software is a far cry from understanding how to read and write code.
Traditional liberal arts courses provide a broader understanding of what defines humanity. There is a breadth and interconnectedness in those courses that is not present in programming languages which are essentially practical knowledge. For example, if a student learns KOBOL, 90% of what he learns will be practically useless today because little of the Framework upon which to hang that knowledge still exists. At best the student could keep the generalized concepts, but that is a negligible portion of the material learned. But if a student reads Faulkner, while there may be significantly less practical application, a much greater portion goes to explain the general repository of humanity and its collective knowledge (southern culture, how we process death, Reformation, how the mentally challenged mind works, etc.). A better solution would be computer literacy courses rather than programming courses. I use my knowledge of geography significantly more than I use my knowledge of Java and C++ on a day-to-day basis. That doesn't mean I shouldn't know about computers generally, but why waste my time learning a practical skill set to glean the global knowledge when so much of the practical material will be useless to me?
Wooh, another completely incorrect Slashdot title for the win. Because the pics DO disappear when you open them. Both from your phone and their servers. There's just an exploit where rooted phones can view/copy the pictures before they are opened/deleted. "Don't disappear" =/ discretely copyable.
OP is not at all wrong, and it's bullish of you to suggest that a business should simply change its entire operating strategy to account for the limitations of the install base of the operating system. I worked as a CTO for a niche retail business (wine) which had certain custom measures to track in order to maintain basic levels of inventory management (e.g. multiple vintages and sizes use the same SKU). The stores had already deployed Macs for their POS due to the business decisions of my predecessor. I spent months trying to find a POS system that could handle anything beyond the "my first retail system" level. I found three retail POS systems at all. One of them we were already using -- and it didn't work, one of them was similarly barebones and locked down all of the database material so I couldn't export to something like Quickbooks, and then there's Lightspeed, which is big, costly, and spends more time and energy on advertising "It Works on Mac!" than it does providing any utilitarian function whatsoever. I gave up and installed Windows 7 on the systems through BootCamp, opening up at least 30 wine-retail specific POS systems for my pleasure.
Nearly all cross-platform software suites don't talk to one another. Quickbooks won't talk between Mac and PC. More specialized office applications and database applications won't talk to one another. There might be a FEW that will provide interoperability, though it's often buggy beyond belief, and most don't provide critical features necessary to certain businesses. Try and find an actually usable service-based POS (QSRs and restaurants). There are none. I'm sure that's because the Mac hardware is not touchscreen, which makes the OSX unusable to an entire industry.
If the general topic is about replacing your fleet of bulldozers with pickup trucks, parts commonality between the trucks and bulldozers is a pretty important metric.
This is an outrage! We have set up strict trade sanctions to prevent this exact kind of thing from happening! The circumvention of these sanctions is reckless and might endanger the freedoms of Syrian citizens everywhere. To think that we would simply allow Syria to acquire Dell PCs is unfathomable. We need stronger provisions and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that Dell PCs and the dangers that they present do not wind up in the hands of other innocent countries. We must strengthen the already tough sanctions against Dell!
Hating DRM is trendy here on Slashdot, and I'm usually the first to decry it. The problem is not with DRM but with shoddy and opaque implementation of DRM -- i.e. when its implementation hurts honest consumers.
There are a couple good reasons for DRM. One -- and please bear with me here, I promise I can justify it -- is to stop piracy. Okay, yes, DRM as it has been implemented by the vast majority of businesses has been nothing short of abysmal. It punishes the honest consumer without presenting so much as a stumbling block for hardened pirates. There's actually a lot of argumentative parallels here. Why have gun control when criminals will break the law while honest people won't? Why outlaw drugs when people who want to do drugs will do them anyway? These are actually really important arguments. However, while the contrast is stark, it's not a black-and-white scenario. Simply because we have the Second Amendment here in the states doesn't necessarily mean we should be giving everyone a rocket launcher. Marijuana might not be harmful, but should we really let people make meth in motels and poison all of the other guests?
In these scenarios, the key question is what is "reasonable" regulation. In other words, the question is what is economically efficient -- what methods and standards will save us more money in the long run than we will spend? Do we need to install backscatter machines in the airports to protect against terrorists? Probably not -- we'll never see that money back. Should we deregulate and let on someone carrying an RPG? Also, no. The cost of preventing people carrying RPGs on airplanes is minimal compared to the savings. Even assuming I were lawfully carrying my RPG for non terrorist-y activities, what if it accidentally detonated? The savings are greater than the cost.
The same is true with DRM. The problem that consumers have with DRM is that it robs them of the cost of their experience. I paid full price to get some gimped, server-dependent version of the game that was not what was advertised to me. DRM right now is like backscatter machines in airports; it assumes everyone is a criminal, attempts to push the limits of personal freedoms and privacy, and ultimately is probably motivated by greed more than user experience. But that doesn't mean that DRM itself has to be evil or bad. While there are plenty of textbook cases out there of people who download to try-before-buying, or who live in a country where the software/game is unavailable via legitimate retail, there are also a plethora of people who simply want to download a product without paying for it. They'll justify it with the same reasons -- "I'm punishing the developers for X" or "I can't afford it right now." This assumes that the user has some inherent right in the product that gives them the ability to use that product without paying for it. To be honest -- and I know this is going to be an unpopular view -- but the same can be said of regional restrictions. Nothing gives me the personal right to download and play a Japanese game in the U.S. I might justify it by saying that I'm not hurting the copyright holder if he couldn't have sold it to me in the first place. I might think that I have an inherent right in the public domain, that copyright is (as it is) artificial and should only be presumed where the rightsholder is enforcing his rights (i.e. not in the U.S.). But legally that's not how it works. Nothing specifically grants me the right to use something that I have not paid for. Part of the difference is due to internet culture buying into the notion that information is free and should be shared amongst everyone. We recoil when the capitalist world starts to encroach on our free internet with their advertising and paywalls and out-to-make-a-buck mentality, so we flee the corporatized services like Facebook in search of something more open. I digress, though, and that's a different issue.
DRM's problem is in how it's implemented. Inevitably the cost of implementation is great
What you describe is mutually exclusive, and therein lies the problem. If it's a federal tax then it does fall under the purview of the Commerce Clause, which would make it legal although nevertheless a very bad idea, because it doesn't solve the alleged problem (i.e. states not able to recoup revenue). However, as you point out, that's not what is going on at all. The bill specifies that Amazon must conform to state and local tax laws which are attempting to tax Amazon based on sales to the state despite Amazon et al not being present within the state. This is definitively a tariff between states, taxing and price-restricting out-of-state goods to cause the market to favor domestic, in-state products, and is exactly what the Constitution prohibits because trade must remain free (as in liberty) between the states. If the federal government wanted to tax it as interstate commerce it very well could. The states, on the other hand, can only tax sales made within the state, and if the seller does not have an established presence within the state, then the sales occur in the other state where the business is domiciled.
If it's "unconstitutional as heck," then no, no it absolutely should not have happened sooner. You don't just get to flagrantly violate the Constitution -- you know, the document that enumerates states' and citizens' rights -- because it somehow promotes local tribalism. Go amend the Constitution if you want to make something unconstitutional suddenly constitutional. Otherwise, you just basically said it's a good idea to flagrantly violate the fundamental law that has serves as the core of the United States because it affirms your limited idea of what constitutes economic efficiency.
If a state's sales tax is so high that it is more economically efficient to ship the product from a different state at least 48 hours transit time away than to buy from within the state, it's a pretty clear indication that the tax is too high, or the distribution models within the state are lacking. By your logic, we should violate the GATT 1994 and place punitive tariffs on incoming products from China because they rob hardworking Americans U.S. jobs. Because clearly that's a more logical and economically friendly policy than reducing the number of domestic legislative restrictions that sent those jobs overseas in the first place.
Descriptive terms can still have a trademark where they have acquired a secondary meaning in the marketplace, which is how iPhone and iPad have survived. From the USPTO refusal:
Applicant is advised that, if the application is amended to seek registration on the Principal Register underTrademark Act Section 2(f) in part, applicant must disclaim the descriptive wording “MINI” apart fromthe mark as shown because it merely describes a characteristic or feature of applicant’s goods.
And then:
Applicant should submit a disclaimer in the following standardized format: No claim is made to the exclusive right to use “MINI” apart from the mark as shown.
Essentially the problem is that the whole term "iPad Mini" is descriptive, because even if "iPad" were (and it is) a protected trademark, you can't say "small iPad" and make that whole mark trademark-able, which is what "iPad Mini" attempts to do. While the application deconstructs the "iPad" term as merely descriptive (which is unfortunate because it probably makes this ruling appealable, since I don't think the prior trademark applications relied on the secondary meaning exception to a descriptive mark), that's just salt in the wound. The real reason it was denied is because they tried to call their iPad "Mini" and trademark the whole term. It's still quite possible for Apple to use the "iPad(R) Mini" mark denotation.
Also, for those who don't know, (R) is a registered trademark that has been filed with and approved by the USPTO, whereas (TM) is an unfiled trademark that you nevertheless use in business that could stand up to another company using your trademark. (R) [federal] will always trump (TM) [state].
Pyrrhus was an aggressor against Rome who spent exorbitant sums of money to achieve small victories that ultimately led to his losing the war. Veoh was not an aggressor and was bankrupted before the victory could be achieved. In fact, the RIAA and MPAA could be said to be Pyrrhic victors considering how much they spend in litigation without any profit from collection. The proper expression here would be "hollow victory."
"Well that's fantastic, a really smart decision. We can put a DRM requirement into a traditionally single-player game, then we'll require a permanent internet connection to thwart piracy aaaaaand it's gone."
"Uh, what?"
"It's gone. It's all gone."
"What's all gone?"
"The DRM on your game - it was circumvented, it's gone."
"What do you mean? The game is social and computational. It requires servers to make all of those calculations and connections!"
"Not anymore it doesn't. POOF."
"Well, well what can I do to get back my customers?"
"I'm sorry sir, but this release is for DRM-employing, user-abusing companies only."
"But we're EA!"
"Do you have any DRM on your game?"
"No, you just hacked it!"
"Then please stand aside for companies who actually have a poorly-implemented DRM scheme on their game. Next please."
You keep on using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, does he legitimately expect that I'm going to suddenly ditch my phone and throw the contents of my wallet at him for a product that makes Navin's Opti-Grab look stylish simply because he's calling me and one-seventh of the human population -- including women -- castrated girly-men?
The concept of "fighting fire with fire" is little more than an extension of tribalism. At that point, you're no longer sticking to altruistic standards but simply advocating a formless "us vs. them."
To obtain a patent, you need to be able to reduce it to a practicable description, meaning that you do have to show exactly how the patented device works with enough particularity to make it functional right now. Future patents aren't granted. The idea behind it is that if you figure out how to do it but don't actually do it, you've told other people how to do it by posting the patent, and therefore you deserve royalties from that (which means that implementation isn't stymied, it's just expensive). In practice, what we've done is encourage the development of patent trolls given the free transfer of patent rights like property. This could either be fixed by limiting transfers of patent rights or by requiring a modicum percentage of active use and implementation. To require that you actually practice a patent is unfair, though, because I could not reasonably practice implementation of a novel and revolutionary ion space drive or nuclear reactor even if I could design and perfectly describe it on paper.
The idea is that copyright is supposed to benefit the life of the heirs as well as the author, else a 70-something year-old might not have as much incentive to create if he only expects to get a couple years revenue off of it. I'd prefer a system of a flat number of years, like copyright once was and patents still are. 28 was reasonable, 28+28 is acceptable. Life + 70 is overkill. 14 years on patents wouldn't be bad if 1) software patents were actually drawn up by people who knew what the fuck they were doing [the good software patents never become an issue], or 2) software patents didn't last for more than a couple years.
FTFA: The motor is electric, and the fuel tanks are replaced with Li-Ion batteries. But I'll give you style points attempting to stifle scientific hypothetical inquiry and outside-of-the-box thinking with cynical non-imaginativism. Keep it up and you might win the scientific curmudgeon of the year award!
Plants can photosynthesize because they sit there and don't move. Photosynthesis, even as a form of solar energy, is not terribly efficient. Solar cells aren't terribly efficient either. Here's a good discussion on it.
The problem with that "problematic gunk" is that it's just so freakin' energy rich. It's kind of like telling a starving politician, "You can either eat this big, juicy burger that will probably give you a heart attack one day in the future, or you can shell these sustainable Macadamia nuts that are so much healthier for y-- Hey! Put down the burger!"
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're missing the whole point of trademark law. Trademark law is supposed to protect against consumer confusion. Let's say the owner of Quickie decides to dump tens of thousands (businesses are expensive) into revamping machines, improving QoS, adding WiFi and a cable subscription, etc. I think this is a dumb assumption because you're assuming Quickie can even afford to invest in better business practices both in terms of start-up costs and in terms of margins based on revenue generated, but let's even put that aside. We'll pretend Quickie can out-compete Quicky through better business practices.
Quicky, on the other hand, runs a dump. One of the machines electrocuted a guy and their dryers burn clothes. The place is a dump. People get robbed in the parking lot.Cynthia's friend Karl is new to the neighborhood and asks her, "Hey Cynthia, I need a good local laundromat. Know any good ones in the area?" She responds, "For the love of God, don't go to Quicky. Those guys are awful." Karl responds, "Quickie is that bad, huh? Okay, I'll avoid them." He then goes to Bumble and Tumble Laundromat a few blocks over.
No matter how much Quickie improves its business, Quicky will always hurt their business by confusing customers into thinking that they are actually Quickie or into thinking that they are the same business. That is why trademark law exists, and protection is surprisingly affordable to most businesses. Registration is only $275 for federal protection. Quickie's battle is not the same as EA, and they don't have to spend the same gobs of money on lawyers and court fees. 1) It's not going to be litigated beyond the trial court, most likely; 2) there aren't gobs of corporate e-mails to pore through in discovery; and 3) the neighborhood IP attorney isn't going to be as expensive because he or she won't have to specialize in that form of law.
The issue isn't whether the employee (or computer) is an agent and therefore authorized to file any DMCA claim. The issue is whether the authorized agent sent the notice "in good faith." The conundrum is that fair use does not have a bright line test. WB will claim it has no means of knowing whether a use is fair, so all DMCA claims are in good faith. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't work in pre-internet copyright terms. Early dismissal and summary judgment and counter-damages were common where the plaintiff should have known the use was fair. Basically, the problem is that no one can categorize, legally, whether a use is fair except for a judge, and by then you're eyeballs deep in legal fees.
IANAL, but I am familiar with the business. For those of you claiming this is self-destructive, the NMPA as well as individual publishers actually license the lyrics right to certain lyrics websites. The publishers own a valid copyright in the lyrics alone, so legally speaking, republication of the lyrics without copyright license is infringement. Several lyrics websites are officially licensed and sanctioned. I won't name names, but you can usually tell which are licensed and which aren't by the quality and accuracy of the lyrics on the site.
Usually the publishers steer clear of these sites due to lack of personal jurisdiction, or at best make half-hearted efforts by throwing around a take-down notice here or there. Publishers want to collect money, and they're well aware that going after Lars Lokke Ummerstal in Latvia isn't going to be profitable. However, take-down notices are relatively cheap and easy, and I believe the idea is to stick by principle and crack down on infringing websites in order to have a chilling effect on copyright infringement generally. This is not new, or particularly newsworthy.
It's also not really all that infuriating, from a copyleft perspective. Because publishers are licensing their copyrights to lyrics and tablature, they aren't strangling the marketplace of ideas. The only real question is whether or not the sites are unfairly targeting websites legitimately engaging in fair use (as opposed to those actually making money off of advertising revenue and merely claiming their use is fair), but, as fair use is an affirmative defense and not a bright line rule, there's no way for a site to prove as a threshold matter that their use is fair.
Oblig.
This isn't as straightforward now as it used to be. Google has now introduced full-sized image search which allows people to pull images directly from their Google search page rather than linking to the source page. Once upon a time, Google was able to get away with this because it only linked small-sized thumbnails that weren't suitable replacements to the original. The searcher actually had to link to the page to get the content, as you point out.
Now, however, the searcher can get the content, full-sized, directly from the search link without ever hitting the original site. The bandwidth still comes from the original site, but the image can be seen entirely within the Google context. Fascinatingly, this full-sized (as opposed to thumbnail) image linking is exactly the example that the judge in Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc. , which legitimized fair use of image searches, declared would not be an example of fair use.
Google has seemed to have entirely forgotten about that. Curiously, no lawsuits have popped up since. Granted, this is now in the days of robots.txt, but the law hasn't exactly caught up to discern the difference. Surely somebody with an interest in Google's deep pockets would sue for copyright infringement.
That said, the problem is clearly not that "technology" gets preferential treatment but that what one defines as "fair use" is tremendously murky and cannot be statutorily determined. It has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and the pattern of ruling on what constitutes fair use has absolutely no correlation to itself. For example, is it a fair use to watch a movie in a park (semi-public place that might warrant a public performance) to a group of 6 close friends and family? 12? On a big-screen? Who knows.
Until fair use gets locked down as to something other than "whatever the judge feels like is fair," everyone on both sides of the equation will scream about perceived injustice.
A system that restricts access control isn't voluntarily adopted by the marketplace? You don't say! Clearly what we need to do is mandate that this technology be included in all market devices so that even lawful owners must be hindered by the access restrictions since we can't distinguish lawful owners from unlawful ones. It's not like the determined criminals will ever disable the access restrictions, but if they do we just need to make them sufficiently complicated that it's really hard to circumvent. So maybe the complexities will cause a few points of failure for law abiding citizens... let's be realistic; people who own guns are probably all future criminals. Besides, we can criminalize circumvention with some kind of... anticircumvention clause. Better yet, how about we only lease funds so that you can never actually own a gun at all? Then we could know who's firing the weapon by checking it against the access database. We could even restrict firing to only authorized targets. We should call it firearms rights management. If only some kind of marketplace restriction attempted to be forced upon customers already existed, I could prove to you how great and effective a system this would be!
I find it interesting so many people are ready to boycott a movie based on a single high-profile participant's personal beliefs. (See also Tom Cruise) Do you think everyone else working on that movie believes the same? Should their livelihoods be hurt because they associated with a bigot? How many bigots do you work with? Do you know? Would you boycott a movie because the key grip was anti-Semitic? Or do we only care about the opinions of rich people?
You are mistaken.
The legal definition of entrapment varies from country to country, but the basic definition is that entrapment occurs when a law enforcement agent induces a person to commit a crime that he or she otherwise would not have committed. Knowledge that the person is a law enforcement officer is not required. See, e.g. Jacobson v. United States, 503 U.S. 540 (1992). What is required is some form of but-for causation -- that but for the law enforcement officer's conduct, the defendant would not have committed the crime. Whether the defendant knows the officer is a law enforcement agent goes to objective / subjective state of mind standards regarding whether the defendant was likely to commit the crime -- i.e. inducement is harder to prove if the defendant did not know the facilitator was a figure of legal authority, because there is less of an indication of compulsion. In Jacobson, the government targeted the defendant with a child pornography mail subscription and arrested him upon his receipt and opening. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds that the defendant did not have a predisposition towards purchasing child pornography (as no other child pornography was found in his home), and therefore but for the post office inspectors' actions, Jacobson would not have committed a crime.
What you may be referring to is entrapment by estoppel. That "applies when, acting with actual or apparent authority, a government official affirmatively assures the defendant that certain conduct is legal and the defendant reasonably believes that official." United States v. Howell 37 F.3d 1197, 1204 (7th Cir. 1994).
While I don't dispute your basic premise that programming languages should be taught in curricular liberal arts colleges (and indeed I was required to "learn" one at mine), I would argue that there is more to be gleaned from an understanding of literature or history or geography than there is from understanding a programming language. A programming language teaches you the particulars of how to realize software within the context of that software. You might be able to take away some general concepts regarding how computers work, but understanding how a computer executes software is a far cry from understanding how to read and write code.
Traditional liberal arts courses provide a broader understanding of what defines humanity. There is a breadth and interconnectedness in those courses that is not present in programming languages which are essentially practical knowledge. For example, if a student learns KOBOL, 90% of what he learns will be practically useless today because little of the Framework upon which to hang that knowledge still exists. At best the student could keep the generalized concepts, but that is a negligible portion of the material learned. But if a student reads Faulkner, while there may be significantly less practical application, a much greater portion goes to explain the general repository of humanity and its collective knowledge (southern culture, how we process death, Reformation, how the mentally challenged mind works, etc.). A better solution would be computer literacy courses rather than programming courses. I use my knowledge of geography significantly more than I use my knowledge of Java and C++ on a day-to-day basis. That doesn't mean I shouldn't know about computers generally, but why waste my time learning a practical skill set to glean the global knowledge when so much of the practical material will be useless to me?
Wooh, another completely incorrect Slashdot title for the win. Because the pics DO disappear when you open them. Both from your phone and their servers. There's just an exploit where rooted phones can view/copy the pictures before they are opened/deleted. "Don't disappear" =/ discretely copyable.
OP is not at all wrong, and it's bullish of you to suggest that a business should simply change its entire operating strategy to account for the limitations of the install base of the operating system. I worked as a CTO for a niche retail business (wine) which had certain custom measures to track in order to maintain basic levels of inventory management (e.g. multiple vintages and sizes use the same SKU). The stores had already deployed Macs for their POS due to the business decisions of my predecessor. I spent months trying to find a POS system that could handle anything beyond the "my first retail system" level. I found three retail POS systems at all. One of them we were already using -- and it didn't work, one of them was similarly barebones and locked down all of the database material so I couldn't export to something like Quickbooks, and then there's Lightspeed, which is big, costly, and spends more time and energy on advertising "It Works on Mac!" than it does providing any utilitarian function whatsoever. I gave up and installed Windows 7 on the systems through BootCamp, opening up at least 30 wine-retail specific POS systems for my pleasure.
Nearly all cross-platform software suites don't talk to one another. Quickbooks won't talk between Mac and PC. More specialized office applications and database applications won't talk to one another. There might be a FEW that will provide interoperability, though it's often buggy beyond belief, and most don't provide critical features necessary to certain businesses. Try and find an actually usable service-based POS (QSRs and restaurants). There are none. I'm sure that's because the Mac hardware is not touchscreen, which makes the OSX unusable to an entire industry.
If the general topic is about replacing your fleet of bulldozers with pickup trucks, parts commonality between the trucks and bulldozers is a pretty important metric.
This is an outrage! We have set up strict trade sanctions to prevent this exact kind of thing from happening! The circumvention of these sanctions is reckless and might endanger the freedoms of Syrian citizens everywhere. To think that we would simply allow Syria to acquire Dell PCs is unfathomable. We need stronger provisions and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that Dell PCs and the dangers that they present do not wind up in the hands of other innocent countries. We must strengthen the already tough sanctions against Dell!
Hating DRM is trendy here on Slashdot, and I'm usually the first to decry it. The problem is not with DRM but with shoddy and opaque implementation of DRM -- i.e. when its implementation hurts honest consumers.
There are a couple good reasons for DRM. One -- and please bear with me here, I promise I can justify it -- is to stop piracy. Okay, yes, DRM as it has been implemented by the vast majority of businesses has been nothing short of abysmal. It punishes the honest consumer without presenting so much as a stumbling block for hardened pirates. There's actually a lot of argumentative parallels here. Why have gun control when criminals will break the law while honest people won't? Why outlaw drugs when people who want to do drugs will do them anyway? These are actually really important arguments. However, while the contrast is stark, it's not a black-and-white scenario. Simply because we have the Second Amendment here in the states doesn't necessarily mean we should be giving everyone a rocket launcher. Marijuana might not be harmful, but should we really let people make meth in motels and poison all of the other guests?
In these scenarios, the key question is what is "reasonable" regulation. In other words, the question is what is economically efficient -- what methods and standards will save us more money in the long run than we will spend? Do we need to install backscatter machines in the airports to protect against terrorists? Probably not -- we'll never see that money back. Should we deregulate and let on someone carrying an RPG? Also, no. The cost of preventing people carrying RPGs on airplanes is minimal compared to the savings. Even assuming I were lawfully carrying my RPG for non terrorist-y activities, what if it accidentally detonated? The savings are greater than the cost.
The same is true with DRM. The problem that consumers have with DRM is that it robs them of the cost of their experience. I paid full price to get some gimped, server-dependent version of the game that was not what was advertised to me. DRM right now is like backscatter machines in airports; it assumes everyone is a criminal, attempts to push the limits of personal freedoms and privacy, and ultimately is probably motivated by greed more than user experience. But that doesn't mean that DRM itself has to be evil or bad. While there are plenty of textbook cases out there of people who download to try-before-buying, or who live in a country where the software/game is unavailable via legitimate retail, there are also a plethora of people who simply want to download a product without paying for it. They'll justify it with the same reasons -- "I'm punishing the developers for X" or "I can't afford it right now." This assumes that the user has some inherent right in the product that gives them the ability to use that product without paying for it. To be honest -- and I know this is going to be an unpopular view -- but the same can be said of regional restrictions. Nothing gives me the personal right to download and play a Japanese game in the U.S. I might justify it by saying that I'm not hurting the copyright holder if he couldn't have sold it to me in the first place. I might think that I have an inherent right in the public domain, that copyright is (as it is) artificial and should only be presumed where the rightsholder is enforcing his rights (i.e. not in the U.S.). But legally that's not how it works. Nothing specifically grants me the right to use something that I have not paid for. Part of the difference is due to internet culture buying into the notion that information is free and should be shared amongst everyone. We recoil when the capitalist world starts to encroach on our free internet with their advertising and paywalls and out-to-make-a-buck mentality, so we flee the corporatized services like Facebook in search of something more open. I digress, though, and that's a different issue.
DRM's problem is in how it's implemented. Inevitably the cost of implementation is great
What you describe is mutually exclusive, and therein lies the problem. If it's a federal tax then it does fall under the purview of the Commerce Clause, which would make it legal although nevertheless a very bad idea, because it doesn't solve the alleged problem (i.e. states not able to recoup revenue). However, as you point out, that's not what is going on at all. The bill specifies that Amazon must conform to state and local tax laws which are attempting to tax Amazon based on sales to the state despite Amazon et al not being present within the state. This is definitively a tariff between states, taxing and price-restricting out-of-state goods to cause the market to favor domestic, in-state products, and is exactly what the Constitution prohibits because trade must remain free (as in liberty) between the states. If the federal government wanted to tax it as interstate commerce it very well could. The states, on the other hand, can only tax sales made within the state, and if the seller does not have an established presence within the state, then the sales occur in the other state where the business is domiciled.
Um, what?
If it's "unconstitutional as heck," then no, no it absolutely should not have happened sooner. You don't just get to flagrantly violate the Constitution -- you know, the document that enumerates states' and citizens' rights -- because it somehow promotes local tribalism. Go amend the Constitution if you want to make something unconstitutional suddenly constitutional. Otherwise, you just basically said it's a good idea to flagrantly violate the fundamental law that has serves as the core of the United States because it affirms your limited idea of what constitutes economic efficiency.
If a state's sales tax is so high that it is more economically efficient to ship the product from a different state at least 48 hours transit time away than to buy from within the state, it's a pretty clear indication that the tax is too high, or the distribution models within the state are lacking. By your logic, we should violate the GATT 1994 and place punitive tariffs on incoming products from China because they rob hardworking Americans U.S. jobs. Because clearly that's a more logical and economically friendly policy than reducing the number of domestic legislative restrictions that sent those jobs overseas in the first place.
Applicant is advised that, if the application is amended to seek registration on the Principal Register underTrademark Act Section 2(f) in part, applicant must disclaim the descriptive wording “MINI” apart fromthe mark as shown because it merely describes a characteristic or feature of applicant’s goods.
And then:
Applicant should submit a disclaimer in the following standardized format: No claim is made to the exclusive right to use “MINI” apart from the mark as shown.
Essentially the problem is that the whole term "iPad Mini" is descriptive, because even if "iPad" were (and it is) a protected trademark, you can't say "small iPad" and make that whole mark trademark-able, which is what "iPad Mini" attempts to do. While the application deconstructs the "iPad" term as merely descriptive (which is unfortunate because it probably makes this ruling appealable, since I don't think the prior trademark applications relied on the secondary meaning exception to a descriptive mark), that's just salt in the wound. The real reason it was denied is because they tried to call their iPad "Mini" and trademark the whole term. It's still quite possible for Apple to use the "iPad(R) Mini" mark denotation.
Also, for those who don't know, (R) is a registered trademark that has been filed with and approved by the USPTO, whereas (TM) is an unfiled trademark that you nevertheless use in business that could stand up to another company using your trademark. (R) [federal] will always trump (TM) [state].
Pyrrhus was an aggressor against Rome who spent exorbitant sums of money to achieve small victories that ultimately led to his losing the war. Veoh was not an aggressor and was bankrupted before the victory could be achieved. In fact, the RIAA and MPAA could be said to be Pyrrhic victors considering how much they spend in litigation without any profit from collection. The proper expression here would be "hollow victory."
"Well that's fantastic, a really smart decision. We can put a DRM requirement into a traditionally single-player game, then we'll require a permanent internet connection to thwart piracy aaaaaand it's gone."
"Uh, what?"
"It's gone. It's all gone."
"What's all gone?"
"The DRM on your game - it was circumvented, it's gone."
"What do you mean? The game is social and computational. It requires servers to make all of those calculations and connections!"
"Not anymore it doesn't. POOF."
"Well, well what can I do to get back my customers?"
"I'm sorry sir, but this release is for DRM-employing, user-abusing companies only."
"But we're EA!"
"Do you have any DRM on your game?"
"No, you just hacked it!"
"Then please stand aside for companies who actually have a poorly-implemented DRM scheme on their game. Next please."
You keep on using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, does he legitimately expect that I'm going to suddenly ditch my phone and throw the contents of my wallet at him for a product that makes Navin's Opti-Grab look stylish simply because he's calling me and one-seventh of the human population -- including women -- castrated girly-men?
The concept of "fighting fire with fire" is little more than an extension of tribalism. At that point, you're no longer sticking to altruistic standards but simply advocating a formless "us vs. them."
To obtain a patent, you need to be able to reduce it to a practicable description, meaning that you do have to show exactly how the patented device works with enough particularity to make it functional right now. Future patents aren't granted. The idea behind it is that if you figure out how to do it but don't actually do it, you've told other people how to do it by posting the patent, and therefore you deserve royalties from that (which means that implementation isn't stymied, it's just expensive). In practice, what we've done is encourage the development of patent trolls given the free transfer of patent rights like property. This could either be fixed by limiting transfers of patent rights or by requiring a modicum percentage of active use and implementation. To require that you actually practice a patent is unfair, though, because I could not reasonably practice implementation of a novel and revolutionary ion space drive or nuclear reactor even if I could design and perfectly describe it on paper.
The idea is that copyright is supposed to benefit the life of the heirs as well as the author, else a 70-something year-old might not have as much incentive to create if he only expects to get a couple years revenue off of it. I'd prefer a system of a flat number of years, like copyright once was and patents still are. 28 was reasonable, 28+28 is acceptable. Life + 70 is overkill. 14 years on patents wouldn't be bad if 1) software patents were actually drawn up by people who knew what the fuck they were doing [the good software patents never become an issue], or 2) software patents didn't last for more than a couple years.
Dude, read the full article. Seriously.
FTFA: The motor is electric, and the fuel tanks are replaced with Li-Ion batteries. But I'll give you style points attempting to stifle scientific hypothetical inquiry and outside-of-the-box thinking with cynical non-imaginativism. Keep it up and you might win the scientific curmudgeon of the year award!
Plants can photosynthesize because they sit there and don't move. Photosynthesis, even as a form of solar energy, is not terribly efficient. Solar cells aren't terribly efficient either. Here's a good discussion on it.
The problem with that "problematic gunk" is that it's just so freakin' energy rich. It's kind of like telling a starving politician, "You can either eat this big, juicy burger that will probably give you a heart attack one day in the future, or you can shell these sustainable Macadamia nuts that are so much healthier for y-- Hey! Put down the burger!"